.

On Oct. 2, New Tang Dynasty Television, a station linked to the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, posted a Facebook video of a woman saving a baby shark stranded on a shore. Next to the video was a link to subscribe to The Epoch Times, a newspaper that is tied to Falun Gong and that spreads anti-China and right-wing conspiracies. The post collected 33,000 likes, comments and shares.

10月2日,有着中国精神运动法轮功背景的新唐人电视台在Facebook上发布了一段视频,内容是一名女子拯救搁浅在岸边的小鲨鱼。视频旁边有一个订阅《大纪元时报》的链接,该报与法轮功关系紧密,散布反华和右翼阴谋论。该帖得到了3.3万个赞、评论和转发。

The website of Dr. Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician who researchers say is a chief spreader of coronavirus misinformation online, regularly posts about cute animals that generate tens or even hundreds of thousands of interactions on Facebook. The stories include “Kitten and Chick Nap So Sweetly Together” and “Why Orange Cats May Be Different From Other Cats,” written by Dr. Karen Becker, a veterinarian.

约瑟夫·麦科拉博士是一名骨科医师,研究人员称他是新冠病毒虚假信息的主要网络传播者,他的网站经常在Facebook上发布可爱小动物的帖子,产生数万甚至数十万次互动,包括《小猫和小鸡在一起睡得好甜蜜》和《为什么橘猫可能与众不同》,这些故事由兽医凯伦·贝克尔博士撰写。

And Western Journal, a right-wing publication that has published unproven claims about the benefits of using hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19, and spread falsehoods about fraud in the 2020 presidential election, owns Liftable Animals, a popular Facebook page. Liftable Animals posts stories from Western Journal’s main website alongside stories about golden retrievers and giraffes.

右翼出版物《西方日报》(The Western Journal)发表了使用羟氯喹治疗新冠的好处,但这些说法未经证实。它还散布了有关2020年总统大选作假的谎言。《西方日报》拥有热门Facebook页面“可以抱的动物(Liftable Animals)”。除了金毛猎犬和长颈鹿,该页面还发布来自《西方日报》主站的报道。

Videos and GIFs of cute animals — usually cats — have gone viral online for almost as long as the internet has been around. Many of the animals became famous: There’s Keyboard Cat, Grumpy Cat, Lil Bub and Nyan Cat, just to name a few.

自从有互联网以来,可爱小动物——一般是猫——的视频和动图就在网上广泛流传。其中不少都出名了:弹琴猫(Keyboard Cat)、不爽猫(Grumpy Cat)、抱抱(Lil Bub)和彩虹猫(Nyan Cat)等等。

Now, it is becoming increasingly clear how widely the old-school internet trick is being used by people and organizations peddling false information online, misinformation researchers say.

虚假信息研究人员表示,一些人和组织广泛利用这种老套伎俩在网上宣扬虚假信息,现在这一点变得越来越明显。

The posts with the animals do not directly spread false information. But they can draw a huge audience that can be redirected to a publication or site spreading false information about election fraud, unproven coronavirus cures and other baseless conspiracy theories entirely unrelated to the videos. Sometimes, following a feed of cute animals on Facebook unknowingly signs users up as subscribers to misleading posts from the same publisher.

小动物的帖子并不直接用于传播虚假信息。但这些帖子可以吸引大量观众,然后将他们重定向到一些出版物或网站,那里散播有关选举舞弊的虚假信息、未经证实的新冠病毒疗法和其他与视频完全无关的、毫无根据的阴谋论。有时,在Facebook上关注可爱动物的帐号会导致用户在不知不觉中订阅同一发布者发出的误导性帖子。
《为什么橘猫可能与众不同》的作者、兽医凯伦·贝克尔在约瑟夫·麦科拉医生的网站上分享宠物建议。
《为什么橘猫可能与众不同》的作者、兽医凯伦·贝克尔在约瑟夫·麦科拉医生的网站上分享宠物建议。

Melissa Ryan, chief executive of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation, said this kind of “engagement bait” helped misinformation actors generate clicks on their pages, which can make them more prominent in users’ feeds in the future. That prominence can drive a broader audience to content with inaccurate or misleading information, she said.

研究虚假信息的咨询公司卡片战略(Card Strategies)的首席执行官梅丽莎·瑞安表示,这种“互动诱饵”帮助虚假信息传播者制造点击量,让他们的帐号在用户未来的时间线上更加突出。她说,这种突出地位可以让更广泛的受众看到不准确或误导性的信息。

“The strategy works because the platforms continue to reward engagement over everything else,” Ms. Ryan said, “even when that engagement comes from” publications that also publish false or misleading content.

“这样的策略有效,因为平台仍然将对互动的奖励放在首位”,瑞安说,“即使这些互动来自”同时发布虚假或误导性内容的出版物。

Perhaps no organization deploys the tactic as forcefully as Epoch Media, parent company of The Epoch Times. Epoch Media has published videos of cute animals in 12,062 posts on its 103 Facebook pages in the past year, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Those posts, which include links to other Epoch Media websites, racked up nearly four billion views. Trending World, one of Epoch’s Facebook pages, was the 15th most popular page on the platform in the United States between July and September.

《大纪元时报》的母公司大纪元媒体对这种策略的部署力度几乎无人能及。根据《纽约时报》的一项分析,大纪元媒体过去一年在103个Facebook页面上的12062个帖子中发布了可爱动物的视频。这些帖子,包括指向其他大纪元媒体网站的链接,获得了近40亿的浏览量。“全球流行(Trending World)”是大纪元的Facebook页面之一,在7月至9月美国地区最受欢迎的页面中排名第15。

One video, posted last month by The Epoch Times’s Taiwan page, shows a close-up of a golden retriever while a woman tries in vain to pry an apple from its mouth. It has over 20,000 likes, shares and comments on Facebook. Another post, on Trending World’s Facebook page, features a seal grinning widely with a family posing for a picture at a Sea World resort. The video has 12 million views.

在《大纪元时报》台湾页面上个月发布的一段视频显示了一只金毛犬的特写,一名女子试图从它的嘴里将一个苹果撬出来,但徒劳无功。这段视频在Facebook上有超过2万个点赞、转发和评论。在“全球流行”的Facebook页面上的另一篇帖子中,一只海豹在海洋世界度假村与一家人合影时咧嘴微笑。该视频被观看了1200万次

Epoch Media did not respond to a request for comment.

大纪元媒体没有回应置评请求。

“Dr. Becker is a veterinarian, her articles are about pets,” said an email from Dr. Mercola’s public relations team. “We reject any New York Times accusations of misleading any visitors, but are not surprised by it.”

“贝克尔博士是一名兽医,她的文章是关于宠物的,”麦科拉博士的公关团队在一封电子邮件说。“我们反对《纽约时报》关于我们误导访问者的指控,但并不感到惊讶。”

The viral animal videos often come from places like Jukin Media and ViralHog. The companies identify extremely shareable videos and reach licensing deals with the people who made them. After securing the rights to the videos, Jukin Media and ViralHog license the clips to other media companies, giving a cut of the profits to the original creator.

走红的小动物视频通常来自Jukin Media和ViralHog等公司。这些公司找到容易被分享的视频,并与视频制作者签署许可协议。在获得视频版权后,Jukin Media和ViralHog将这些视频许可授权给其他媒体公司使用,并与原创者分成。

Mike Skogmo, Jukin Media’s senior vice president for marketing and communications, said his company had a licensing deal with New Tang Dynasty Television, the station tied to Falun Gong.

Jukin Media营销和传播高级副总裁迈克·斯科格莫表示,他的公司已与法轮功相关媒体新唐人电视台签订了许可协议。

“Jukin has licensing deals with hundreds of publishers worldwide, across the political spectrum and with a range of subject matters, under guidelines that protect the creators of the works in our library,” he said in a statement.

他在一份声明中说:“Jukin根据保护我们资源库作品的创作者的指导方针,与全球数百家内容发行商签订了许可协议,这些发行商涉及不同的政治光谱和一系列主题。”

Asked whether the company evaluated whether their clips were used as engagement bait for misinformation in striking the license deals, Mr. Skogmo said Jukin had nothing else to add.

斯科格莫被问到,在达成许可协议交易时,公司是否评估了视频被用作虚假信息的诱饵的可能性。斯科格莫表示Jukin对此无可奉告。

“Once someone licenses our raw content, what they do with it is up to them,” said Ryan Bartholomew, founder of ViralHog. “ViralHog is not supporting or opposing any cause or objective — that would be outside of our scope of business.”

“一旦有人购买我们的原始内容的使用许可,他们如何处理这些内容取决于他们自己,”ViralHog的创始人瑞安·巴塞洛缪说。“ViralHog不支持或反对任何事业或目标——这不属于我们的业务范围。”

The use of animal videos presents a conundrum for the tech platforms like Facebook, because the animal posts themselves do not contain misinformation. Facebook has banned ads from Epoch Media when the network violated its political advertising policy, and it took down several hundred Epoch Media-affiliated accounts last year when it determined that the accounts had violated its “coordinated inauthentic behavior” policies.

遭到利用的小动物视频给Facebook等技术平台带来了一个难题,因为小动物帖子本身不包含虚假信息。当大纪元媒体违反政治广告政策时,Facebook曾禁止其投放广告,并在去年认定这些帐户违反了“相互配合的虚假行为”政策后,关闭了数百个与大纪元媒体相关的帐号。

“We’ve taken enforcement actions against Epoch Media and related groups several times already,” said Drew Pusateri, a Facebook spokesman. “If we discover that they’re engaging in deceptive actions in the future we will continue enforcing against them.” The company did not comment on the tactic of using cute animals to spread misinformation.

“我们已经多次对大纪元媒体和相关团体采取强制措施,”Facebook发言人德鲁·普萨特里说。“如果我们发现他们今后有欺骗行为,将继续对他们采取强制措施。”该公司没有评论使用可爱小动物传播虚假信息的策略。

Rachel E. Moran, a researcher at the University of Washington who studies online misinformation, said it was unclear how often the animal videos led people to misinformation. But posting them continues to be a popular tactic because they run such a low risk of breaking a platform’s rules.

华盛顿大学研究网络虚假信息的研究员雷切尔·E·莫兰表示,目前尚不清楚小动物视频将人们引流到虚假信息的频繁程度。但是发布这些视频仍然是一种流行的策略,因为它们违反平台规则的风险非常低。

“Pictures of cute animals and videos of wholesome moments are the bread and butter of social media, and definitely won’t run afoul of any algorithmic content moderation detection,” Ms. Moran said.

“可爱小动物的图片和暖心视频是社交媒体的生计来源,绝对不会违反任何算法内容审核检测,”莫兰说。

“People are still using it every day,” she said.

“人们仍然每天都在用这招,”她说。

Jacob Silver对本文有研究贡献。

Davey Alba是《纽约时报》科技记者,负责报道虚假信息。她在2019年获得利文斯顿杰出国际报道奖以及镜像最佳新闻报道奖。欢迎在Twitter上关注她:@daveyalba

翻译:纽约时报中文网

点击查看本文英文版。